Christopher Jan BenitezWhen starting out with your online business, conventional wisdom will advise you to set up a Google AdSense account so you can monetize your site or blog. This ad platform will allow you to feature ad blocks at specific parts on the pages of your site. Once your visitors click on these ad units, you will earn a nominal fee for driving traffic to your advertisers. The more visitors who click on your ads, the more money you will receive.
Sounds simple in principle, but the truth of the matter is that earning lots of money through AdSense is difficult to pull off.
The problem with AdSense
The first thing you have to worry about is increasing ad impressions to boost click-through rate (CTR). This can only be done if you drive thousands and millions of visitors to your site and if the ad units are placed on optimum parts of the page.
Therefore, aside from performing different ways to increase your traffic (which could take years to develop), you will probably need to do A/B testing to see which parts of your page the units get clicked on the most.
Even then, the amount you will be getting from your ad units may not be enough to your liking, especially after spending lots of time setting up the ads to optimizing your earnings.
The solution? Since AdSense is just a single ad platform that you can use for your site, you ought to use other forms of online ad programs to fully realize your earnings potential. One way of doing this is by setting up another contextual advertisement on your site on top of your ad units.
Why contextual advertisement?
This type of ad program like Infolinks, Clicksor, and Chitika, among others, scans for the most repeated words and phrases on the body on the page of your site and use them as anchor text that links to a relevant ad site.
Contextual advertising is beneficial to your online business and can improve your revenue because of the following reasons:
It delivers highly targeted ads based on your content
When producing content for your site, you will find yourself relying on specific keywords to not only optimize the site pages on search engines, but to also deliver the type of content that your target audience clamors for.
Since this ad type mainly focuses on the most used keyword on your page, it will then deliver ads based on that phrase or those that line up with the interests of your audience, both of which play well into the overall user experience with your site. As a result, contextual advertising allows you to receive higher impressions and CTR from your ad links, which leads to higher earnings.
It is non-invasive
Visitors respond well to ads that are not thrown into their face upon visiting a website. Therefore, as a website owner, you need an ad platform that strikes the perfect balance between featuring attractive, eye-catching, and relevant ads on your site and showing ads that do not interrupt their experience with the site they visited. This is exactly what contextual advertising does for your site. This ad platform will not feature ads that are unrelated to the content of your site and will show the ads in such a way that it does not hog all the attention or annoy visitors.
It is a great complement to your existing ad platform
If you already have AdSense in place on your site, then also use context advertising to further increase your site’s earnings potential. Unlike ad units which normally appear on static parts of your site pages, i.e. header, footer, sidebar, contextual advertising can appear on non-traditional parts of your site for increased chances of getting clicked on. Having all these different ad programs working for you can only help increase your site’s revenue.
Question: What are your experiences in using contextual advertising to increase your site earnings? Share to us your thoughts by commenting below!
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